1/14/2011 @ 2:40PM

The Immorality Of Public Safety Nets

Running a Ponzi scheme in practice requires running one in the intellectual sense too. Rationally, a moral defense of public safety nets is absurd. Any such attempt is easily defeated on its own terms, and its defenders have long known the refutation. They are hoping that those who subsidize these schemes do not figure it out.

Public safety nets rely on the idea that a group or society is a superordinate entity for which individuals are morally obligated to sacrifice. In reality there are only individuals, and when we speak of groups we are merely integrating a number of individuals into a mental unit based on an observed similarity. When the people call for putting the welfare of society above individuals, they mean that some individuals must have their rights violated for the benefit of other individuals in that society. They intend the sacrifices to be involuntary, or they would not be speaking of them in a political context.

Public safety nets apply this idea on a grand scale. At their core, public safety nets use government force to systematically seize property from some individuals and transfer the loot to others, with the implicit threat of organized government violence against those who resist. Public safety nets are systematized robbery by government proxy.

If groups were some sort of real entity and the welfare of the group takes precedence over individuals, then logically, the weak and helpless must be sacrificed for the sake of the more able, since the weakest weigh down the group. It is the duty of the weakest and most helpless to voluntarily sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group rather than weighing it down.

And if life is so precarious that misfortune could strike anyone at any time, regardless of how hard she or he works, then it is all the more imperative for the sake of the group that the unable not receive any aid. In such an inhospitable world, resources are precious and all members of the group are put at risk by a policy of material redistribution to those who cannot produce more than they consume. You wouldn’t want to jeopardize the group for a few individuals, would you? That would be immoral.

On the other hand, if life is auspicious enough that most people can attain success and only a few are impoverished despite the existence of private charity, then there is no problem. The group itself is admittedly successful. The left has nothing to complain about.

The leftists who advocate for public safety nets operate on sheer hypocrisy. If they really took collectivism seriously, they would willingly and openly admit all this. Instead, they abandon any semblance of consistency and substitute reason with the vocal insistence that productive members of society help those who do not produce enough for themselves.

The dirty little secret they do not discuss is that there is no rational ultimate moral justification for this policy. The idea that unchosen others must come before someone else is grounded in absolutely nothing. It is philosophical garbage.

In the history of human thought, there has never been a consistent, logically supported argument for why “others” are the basic unit of morality which the individual is obligated to serve. The notion that self-sacrifice is the good is pushed as an unquestionable article of faith and defended by blind guilt-mongering because there is no way to defend it rationally. Altruist-collectivist philosophy is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.

Nothing justifies violating individual rights to achieve some social end, and it is not to the individual’s benefit to live in a society where individual rights are not completely respected and enforced. Enslavement of human beings to a system of glorified robbery is a clear-cut violation of individual rights, and putting a maternal smiley face on that system does not alter its fundamental nature or make it any less evil.

The truth is that no one has to be sacrificed for anybody, and no one should be. The absence of entitlement programs is not a violation of anybody’s rights, and, contrary to the view of some pundits, abjuring from robbing others in such a manner is not a “sacrifice.” It is justice.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other public safety nets should not exist. Their total abolition is a moral imperative.